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The $25k car is going extinct?

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Re: The $25k car is going extinct?

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure, a lot of people seem quick to blame children for “darting” in to the road instead of accepting responsibility for operating a dangerous machine.

People lay the blame on children and their parents because if they choose to do their best bipedal impression of a deer there's really nothing a driver can do. One could be going 10mph and if a child darts out from parked cars at the right time you're gonna hit them. Heck, adults get hit by forklifts and other heavy equipment going single digit speeds all the time and even workplaces that separate traffic nearly comp…

Reducing speed limits to 30 kph where there might be kids running out from between vehicles is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, yet drivers oppose this.

Re: The $25k car is going extinct?

#452
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. My (UK) house is 125 years old. Its depreciating days are well behind it.

How can a house stop depreciating if every part of it and everything in it becomes older as time passes? The only thing stopping depreciation is regular maintenance which costs money.

A fancy old house is more fancy than a new fancy house.

Re: The $25k car is going extinct?

#453
post #300

You can still buy a new subcompact car (like a Renault Clio or Skoda Fabia) in Europe for under 20k EUR. The more interesting question is why these cars disappeared in the US. And while many of the factors discussed here are true for both EU and US (inflation, interest rates, manufacturer profit margins etc) I am surprised no one mentioned the 'SUV loophole' of US regulations that effectively boosted the SUVs (off-ro…

Isn’t your argument basically saying that people choose to buy larger cars when the government doesn’t step in and penalize people for doing so? European regulators basically just forcing people to buy smaller cars is what that sounds like. Also Europeans make less money, pay more taxes, and have less access to credit, so they can’t afford more expensive cars like many Americans. Hence the market catering more to peo…

It's also roads. On narrower roads smaller cars feel better and you have a lot more narrow roads in Europe.

Re: The $25k car is going extinct?

#454
I'm personally super upset with basically all non-Chinese brands. They used the post-covid inflation to drive prices up and like many people are saying here, now the 12k entry-level car is a 25k car. I bought a brand new VW T-Cross in 2021 for 19k and now the entry price is 27k, for the same exact car. It's insane. I understand people want bigger cars and even price conscious costumers are now going for compact suv (VW T-Cross instead of a Polo) so makers are definitely cashin in on this.

But there is also a Greed side to this story. Automakers have hiked prices, customers have kept buying and we finally (i hope) reached a breaking point. Jeep prices were apparently too high and sales plunged.

All of this makes me actually quite happy for the arrival of Chinese manufacturers. The price/quality ratio is extremely good and when i see the price i finally feel that it's a good deal. It makes me want to buy that car, while with most European manufacturers i'm just thinking of being scammed!

Re: The $25k car is going extinct?

#455

I work on my own cars now (as a hobby really) and one of the reasons the new cars are so expensive is they are much more complicated. A lot of this seems to be over-engineering IMO. This is alluded to in the article, but not explicitly stated. The cars I work on are from the early 90s and everything is very simple to understand. e.g. Electronics are normally simple circuits that aren't much more complicated than what…

There's more to it than 'electronics'.

Here's my more recent fixes:

-----------------------------------

1. The fuel pipe saga.

Fuel pipe from pump (tank) to engine is a single, molded, hard-plastic and inflexible pipe. Connecting it to new quick release attachments on either end requires a heat gun. At the factory they can heat-shrink the connectors onto the pipes as there is no fuel in the car.

When my quick-release snapped off[1] while I was replacing the fuel pump, dealer quoted my ZAR17,500 for a replacement pipe. To actually install it would require removing everything under the car because it is inflexible and molded to the shape of the car.

Older cars had less efficient (i.e. thicker OD pipes with the same ID) fuel pipes, but they were flexible and easy to route. They used standard clamps which are available for cents right now. The advantage of the newer pipes is that:

a) Cheaper to install (done by robots), and

b) With the quick release joiner, easy for a robot to snap on the connections on either end.

With the older, cheaper and repairable flexible pipes, the manufacturing process required a human. The more expensive pipes result in a cheaper-to-assemble car, even if the BOM is higher.

-----------------------------------

2. Heater blower motor refusing to come on. The AC units (including heater and blower motor) are controlled by low-current signals. This lets the unit have a rotary encoder when the human wants to adjust blower speed manually while still allowing the microcontroller to adjust blower speed when the user simply sets a target temperature.

This requires an additional current-splitter to limit the current to the blower motor (controlling the speed) while maintaining the voltage. When the blower is spinning at a low speed current is dumped into a heat sink and the blower gets very little current. At high speed no current needs to be dumped and the blower can spin at full speed.

My current limiter melted. This required a manufacturer-only replacement, as the digital signals controlling it are completely opaque to the technician (me) fixing the car.[2] Older cars without the rotary encoder had physical switches that switched the blower motor between one of 5 output speeds. Anything in the older system that broke can be replaced by standard switches and relays.

Anything, even the smallest component, in the newer HVAC system that breaks means you have to hope like hell that the manufacturer is still making parts for the car.

In this scenario, a 1995 mid-range car is going to outlive a 2025 mid-range sedan.

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3. Engine and transmissions!

This is the big one: a 2015 car that, after 20 years, has a worn out slushbox, might have to be thrown away! Why? Because if you are unable to replace the clutches and springs and other parts inside the slushbox due to lack of parts availability, you can't simply swap in a new one, or replace it with a manual - the car is going to throw up a dozen diagnostic codes and probably won't even start.

That 1995 mid-range car? The engine and transmission are not coded to work with each other only. Swap in a Toyota v6 engine+transmission into a broke-ass Ford? Sure, why not?

Same with the radio. In older cars the radio was a swappable unit with standard sizes. In new cars the infotainment system is rarely a regular shape, and in those cars where it is nothing but a screen, it's still hooked into the CAN bus to deliver warnings!

You can upgrade your 1995 mid-range car to use the latest in infotainment technology (maps, voice commands, etc) by simply buying a head unit off Amazon. You cannot upgrade your top-off-the-range Range Rover, Mercedes Benz or Audi just 4 years after purchase!

-----------------------------------

My point is this: the older cars can, with simple mechanical and electro-mechanical non-manufacturer parts, effectively run until humanity just doesn't have fuel anymore. The newer cars will, once the manufacturer stops producing parts for them, have to be scrapped.

There is little incentive for the manufacturer to continue producing parts for a 10-year old car, and that gets even smaller as the car ages.

In fact, I completely expect, as time goes on, that manufacturers would (if they haven't started already) code each component to the VIN or secret key so that parts from a breakers yard won't run in any other car even if it's the same model.

Their preference is: When the radio breaks, it's time to buy a new car or live without a radio.

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[1] Plastic that over time got brittle.

[2] With a lot of work and lugging my ancient 'scope to the car, I could have worked out what signals were being sent (if digital; analogue would have been easier of course, requiring only a multimeter), designed a circuit around a MOSFET or similar and used a tiny microcontroller to read the signals and control the current.

Re: The $25k car is going extinct?

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a big part of owning a vehicle is summer roadtrips, ski vacations, visiting family, moving stuff. An SUV is simply more convenient. I've also found road maintenance is getting worse where I live, it's almost necessary having an SUV or truck just to navigate the suburbs. Also the (semi) compact crossover has kind of killed the compact car. You get more space, better ground clearance, for a decent price.

What you don’t mention are the increased negative externalities of your larger vehicle, including a higher chance of killing people, more road space used for parking, worse visibility for others, etc.

I'll be sure to let my elderly mother know she's making society worse by going with the HRV instead of the Civic.

In a world where ~half of all SUVs are some poof-ed up variant of a compact car a nuance free opinion like yours is just insufferable.

Re: The $25k car is going extinct?

#457
post #418
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've also found road maintenance is getting worse where I live Well, bigger cars are a factor that makes the roads degrade faster.

I think that's more relevant with really large vehicles. An SUV is generally somewhere in the range of 1.5-3 tons whereas a loaded semi truck can weigh up to 40 tons. If a road is designed to handle 40 ton vehicles then i have a hard time believing that 2-3 ton vehicles make much of a difference compared to a 1.5 ton vehicle. A semi truck with a trailer will distribute those 40 tons over a larger area due to more and…

It's not so much ground pressure as axle group loading.

You can think of roads as basically retaining walls as they're a hard compacted mass of stuff "floating" in otherwise fairly fluid ground. Sure, high point loads can damage the top surface (not really a problem since anything on tires is fairly low point load) but it's the overall weight you're asking it to bear that causes the pressure to just kinda mush the wall over.

Re: The $25k car is going extinct?

#458
post #423

$25k ?! The last car I bought cost just less than $12k USD new ( on the road including all taxes and fees) around 5 years ago. I know inflation's been high, but not it's not been that high.

> around 5 years ago The article is specifically about the price increase in the last 6 years.

> The article is specifically about the price increase in the last 6 years

My point is that six years ago the cheapest new cars cost less, in many cases a lot less, than $25k. The article itself lists several examples.

Re: The $25k car is going extinct?

#459
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reptilian-brain logic prevents me from even considering getting a loan for car. Houses increase in value, therefore it makes a certain amount of sense to get a loan / mortgage for the purchase of a house (but mainly because no-one - in the world in which I live - can afford to buy one cash). Cars decrease in value, very quickly. Getting a loan for a car is throwing more money away than buying a car in the first pl…

Houses do not increase in value. Land property does (usually). Houses decrease.

They do if your municipality is run by idiots who levy ever increasing regulatory burden on new construction.

Every new edition of the IBC makes my hovel worth more relatively because the cost to create an alternate just keeps on going up.

Re: The $25k car is going extinct?

#460

You can still buy a new subcompact car (like a Renault Clio or Skoda Fabia) in Europe for under 20k EUR. The more interesting question is why these cars disappeared in the US. And while many of the factors discussed here are true for both EU and US (inflation, interest rates, manufacturer profit margins etc) I am surprised no one mentioned the 'SUV loophole' of US regulations that effectively boosted the SUVs (off-ro…

Or get a new simple Kei car in Japan for $9500 https://autoc-one.jp/daihatsu/move/newmodel-5030993/

I bought a used 2015 Daihatsu Move for $3000 last year, I love it. It has physical controls for everything except the windows and mirrors (I mean, still physical controls, but those are hooked up to motors). And it also has a simple stereo with USB audio. Gets incredible gas mileage. Perfect.
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